Despite my cheeky comment which set off this little flame war, I happen to identify more with rural folks myself. Before my family came to the US, my father was a vet serving a multitude of local farms. I grew up surrounded by Holstein dairy cows, pig pens, and rice patties. I'm sorry such a throwaway comment was perceived as a slight against people of rural extraction. I have read the other comments of GP and mostly sympathize with his views. I, myself, have nothing against accents as all other members of my family were too old when we came to the US to learn to speak English without an accent. Trust me, I know what it feels like to be stereotyped by virtue of where one calls home. As a high school student, I studied one summer at Cornell in Ithaca, New York. Apparently, high schoolers from other parts of the country knows of San Francisco only as the "Gay Capital of the World". For what it is worth, my real beef isn't with rural vs urban - my problem is with religious fundamentalism vs. science (which i will broadly include science fiction here) literacy.

Those padawans better learn quick how to build their own light sabers when the hillbilly fundamentalists mass at the gates with pitchforks in hand.

But most are separated by more. I find the featured article to be overtly sensationalist. Excerpts from a wonderful talk by Ken Miller on the Dover ID trial should put things in perspective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi8FfMBYCkk The fusion of chromosome #2 Dr. Miller alluded to is arguably *much* more significant than any single gene alleged in the article. I don't object to this submission as "news for nerds, stuff that matters." But jokes aside, we need much better QA for science writing in general.

Where have you been? For a long time already, men have had their hands in their jeans, fiddling with themselves. Whether or not that makes you a monkey is a point of disagreement among individuals of different cultural persuasions.

There is no compelling contextual evidence for the age or gender of the original poster. For all we know, sexconker might very well be a young girl with a geeky streak who happens to like gourmet ice cream and pretty boys with good pipes. I sang baritone in school. An i've been told i clean up well. Anyone in SF bay area interested in starting an a Capella group? We can call ourselves "Super Cache", or maybe go with "Beowulf". What kind of name is likely to attract the attention of the geek girl among /.ers? I know! "The GNU Directions"!

I heard it was the other way around. SHE divorced HIM because he was too wrapped up in running his business to bother being much of a husband.

Simple way to test that. Record/measure signal integrity in known EM noisy and EM quiet environments with the same hardware. I'd be genuinely curious if anyone knows of any such benchmarking to test equipment quality.

Can't read indeed. The article (most of it, anyway) is behind a pay wall. Care to do a cut and paste for us?

It is up on the church's website: http://libertybc.ws/ministries/sportsmanBanquet.cfm There is a youtube clip of his "testimony".

Well, how about applying his own test to the comments under scrutiny? From his own home page http://broun.house.gov/ at the HoR website:

Ask Slashdot: Is Paul Broun fit to be:

1) A US legislator - responsible for national policy affecting Science, Space and Technology.
2) A medical professional - tasked with health care of the sick and ill.
3) An American Citizen - (ideally) part of a rational, responsible, and well-informed electorate.
4) A Christian - committed to following the teachings of Christ.
5) A Homo Sapien - the name, more or less, means "of the same wisdom/intelligence".

I remember learning that somewhere as well. But when I took microbiology, I was informed the name gonorrhea comes from gono - meaning seed (as in the gonad) and rhea - meaning to flow (as in diarrhea). In antiquity, it was thought the foul discharge of a gonorrhea infection was actually semen. In men, the disease was actually taken as a sign of virility.

In "The Diamond Age", sovereign powers and those with the means engage in (more or less) open conflict using nanomachines colloquially referred to as "mites". Particularly vicious "battles" in these conflicts manifest as smog-like pollution formed by mites of opposing factions destroying each other and leaving inert carcasses hanging in the air and settling over streets, building, etc. like a kind of artificial dust. Those unlucky enough to be caught outside during these times breath them in and have no end of resulting health problems. One of the secondary characters in the story actually ends up in a chronic/palliative care facility as a result of such ill health. Such are the collateral damages in this imagined world. Things like Stuxnet and now the subject of this article appears to be the manifestations of a software form of this type of "armed conflict" (if you can call it that.) Similarly, when non-targeted individuals become infected or otherwise gets caught in the cross-fire, collateral damages result in the form of lost productivity or perhaps just general nuisance. So......

Ask slashdot:

Can you think of an effective way for non-government affiliated denizens of the Internet to respond to such emerging scenarios where geo-politically driven cyber-conflicts have the potential to harm non-participants? For example, would it be appropriate to form an Internet version of the International Red Cross?

Which recent outbreaks are you referring to? Under the formal definition of an epidemic, even 20 cases is significant when considering the localization of the event. With something as virulent as Ebola, "minor" is not the most appropriate characterization under most circumstances. The upside, (if any can be considered as such) is that historic outbreaks of hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola burn so intensely and so quickly they usually burn themselves out even without much public health efforts. (ie. victims succumb quickly and expire before they can be effective in spreading it to others.) Granted, most past events have not been in urban areas with a high population density. In a developed country with modern transportation infrastructure to facilitate movement of (potentially infected) travelers, the result could be catastrophic without a strong effective response from public health services.

Kudos for being broad-minded and mature. But we ought to be old enough to not feed the trolls. The imbecile has already been modded to oblivion. All's well with slashdot.

I'm a Christian Scientist, you insensitive clod!